


The Bluebeard Tarot

by gentlemanadventurer



Category: La Barbe bleue | Bluebeard - Charles Perrault
Genre: Fairy Tales, Poetry, Short Stories, Tarot, more details than you ever wanted, reimagings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 14:53:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10993206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlemanadventurer/pseuds/gentlemanadventurer
Summary: A compilation of the Bluebeard Tarot posts (and other Bluebeard shorts) from Tumblr.





	1. Ace of Swords

# The Key

It is:

  1. remarkably ordinary. Clearly cut at a hardware store, it’s brass-colored and dull, nearly identical to the keys you grew up using for your parents’ front door. That it should open a door just down the hall seems strange and oddly out of place.
  2. small and silver, like the key to a child’s diary. The grip is shaped like a heart. So easy to lose, you thought, yet he found it without hesitation, scooping it up from under the rug in the solarium where you had hidden it. It is a gift, a seed of curiosity planted in the palm of your hand.
  3. long and slender, delicate yet incredibly strong. You tried to snap it against the paving stones or by hurling it against the wall, but it merely chimed like a bell as it fell. It is more beautiful than you are and you hate it.
  4. sharp.
  5. pressed into your hand along with a kiss that brushes across your fingertips. It flutters in your closed hands like the monarch you caught when you were eight, tickling you as it tries to escape. You could never let this butterfly go. 



It is:

  1. cold iron that tears up your skin when you try to put it down.
  2. screaming at you, weeping, begging for you to retrieve it from the drawer where you stashed it. Use it. Use it. Use it.
  3. covered in blood, but you didn’t turn it. You didn’t. He’ll understand, won’t he? He’ll look into your eyes and see that you regret your moment of doubt, but that you chose to trust him. You didn’t look. You didn’t see them, even though you can feel them around you now as you wait for him to walk up the steps. He’ll know. He’ll see that you love him and he won’t hurt you. He won’t. You love him. He won’t hurt you. You love him. He would never hurt you. You love him. He won’t—



It is:

  1. made of glass and hollow. When held up to your eye, it magnifies and distorts in equal measure. You can see. Everything. At last.
  2. the beginning.
  3. the end.




	2. Reasons

Is it love or obsession that drives Bluebeard to what he does?

Surely he has the means to dispose of those bodies – he is wealthy and landed, with, in many tellings, the unerring devotion of his staff and tenants. He would have to, of course, for what is more suspicious than the room at the end of the hallway that their Master keeps locked so carefully? Do you think no blood seeped out from under the door, that no smell ever permeated the largely deserted hallway?

So why does he keep them?

Imagine Bluebeard visiting his wives. In his own way, he did love them all. Their names are engraved on his tongue, on his skin, in his mind. He doesn’t need to see them to remember; he sees them everywhere he goes. Shahdi is in the garden among the roses, bruises around her throat and sad, empty eyes. Rosemund wanders around the library, trailing her fingers along the spines of books she can no longer pull out to read. He keeps an excellent cook and so rarely has to see Evangeline, who is as pale as spilled flour and just as easily scattered, yet always returns.

Helene and Clio are always near each other: in the drawing room, near the piano in the solarium, wandering the front path, lurking in the entryway. Often, they are near to touching, fingertips hovering just shy of each other’s cheeks. They were sisters and close, before he married and destroyed them each in turn. Elena accompanies him on his morning rides – watching in silence as he saddles his horse, standing in the shadow of the pines as he explores the forest alone.

And Beatrice sits at the side of his bed. Once he tried to remove her chair, but awoke in the night to find her standing, watching, waiting.

He has no explanation for what he has done, not really, nor does he expect forgiveness. The room is his temple, his punishment for himself. He forces himself to look upon their ravaged features, to own the ugliness of what he has done. There is beauty in blood, vicious freedom in violence. His fingers are cold. Always.

But the baker’s daughter has a sweet, dimpled smile and black hair that curls like midnight around her chestnut cheeks. He saw her skipping and spinning as she left after delivering bread yesterday and his blood began to pulse again for the first time since… for the first time in a long time.

Tomorrow he will take a careful stroll through town for an accidental encounter. He wonders what types of flowers she likes. Perhaps Shahdi won’t mind parting with some of her roses.

The pink ones.

Yes.


	3. A Song

# For Those Who Didn't Fight

You were motherless at six (an orphan at nine)  
and sometimes you wake with  
visions of the crimson-spattered handkerchiefs  
floating before you. They had been an omen:  
a signal that - at last - it would all be over,  
and when you have those dreams you often weep with relief.  
  
Sea-salt sweat stings your eyes as you push your hair out of your face  
with your free hand.  
  
It’s such a small thing, in the end, that undoes you.  
It’s tiny - easily lost, even - and so clean-cut and perfect  
it seems like he may have never used it.  
Clenched in your hand, its teeth cut  
and the hot blood on your palm reminds you  
it’s now or never.  
And despite what your mind shrieks to you, you choose ‘now’.  
  
You wish you could say that what you see surprises you,  
that the way your skin tingles is due to the  
gaping, copper smiles that greet you, but it’s only the sudden, reassuring surety that, no, you are not  
unique.  
You never were.  
  
Perhaps a different girl might have family  
(maybe a brother would ride to rescue),  
or she might even take up an ax herself,  
or flee. But not you.  
  
You meet him at the front step when he arrives,  
hand him the key in silence, your own blood on your hands.  
You think of the room upstairs, the little, octagonal chamber with its boarded windows.  
  
Perhaps you will gain a new little sister soon  
and perhaps she will meet death with your patience.


	4. Perhaps One Day...

# ...I Will Feel Guilty

“But he’s so ugly,” your sister had murmured, the first time he came to dinner.  You hadn’t noticed, that fateful afternoon when he rescued you from the rain, the way his jaw jutted, his brow twisted, his gaze sharpened. You noticed it later, but by then you didn’t care. Your sister’s words went ignored but for a scowl and an elbow to her ribs. He was tall and broad-shouldered, successful, attentive. If he was less than the Prince Charming you had imagined as a child, you no longer minded. In all respects but his ill-fated face, he was perfect. And he was yours.

He told you that merely a week after you met him, your calloused hand dwarfed within his. “I am yours.” Tears adorned his eyes, unshed, and he told you about them: the two he’d lost. Your heart twisted. To have lost so much - not one, but two wives - and yet to stay so hopeful, so kind. He did not speak of them at length, but his words implied illness, and turmoil, and despair. When your sister joked that he was a murderer, you did more than elbow her. She whined about the bruising on her shin for three days; you felt like an avenging angel, protecting the best thing in your life.

(This you told your sister on a visit home after your wedding, voice hushed and cheeks flushing: _he is as generous in bed as in the rest of his life._ )

When he left town on business, pressing the ring of keys into your hand, his eyes had softened in fond farewell. His fingertips trailed down your cheek and you leaned into his hand, kissing his palm. The little key was brass, or perhaps true gold. It shone among its iron fellows. “Do not go into that room,” he had warned, his voice turning up at the end in an undefined question. “Please.”

And so you hadn’t.

You hadn’t gone into his study either, or poked through the drawers of his bureau. He gave you space, you reasoned; you had no right to infringe upon his. The house had history, as did the man. You felt the ghosts of his wives more strongly than ever when alone in your wide bed while he was gone, but did not fear them. He was yours now and their time had passed. You longed for him every moment of his long trip and once buried your face in his pillow, letting his scent sweep away your loneliness for a moment.

He seemed lost when he returned, taking the keys from you and examining them closely. What he was looking for, you didn’t know, but he seemed cut adrift, confused. Then his smile grew slowly, steadily into a grin. He laughed then, your husband, his great, echoing bear of a laugh, carrying around the tiled entryway until you were swept up in it. Then he kissed you, sweetly, deeply, joyfully, and if you felt tears on his cheeks, you did not question why.

You found out later that there had been more than two. There were seven, all told, in the little room at the end of the hall. Once upon a time, it had been a linen closet. Now it was storage of a different kind. After his death, you dressed in black velvet, draping his hunting coat across your shoulders in an incongruous style that had your sister raising an eyebrow. Then, at the last, you opened the door. You saw them, desiccated and forgotten, all-but mummified by the dead air of their impromptu tomb.

Then you shut the door again. The little brass or gold key glinted red with blood, and you swept it clean with one pass of your widow’s thumb.

In the deep heart of night, you dragged them from the house, one by one, and let them sink into the bog at the far back of the grounds. No one was there to witness your small, secret smile. No one but the ghosts you laid at last to rest. He was yours, you now knew with proven certainty, in a way he was never theirs. You held his trust, you kept his heart, and now, at the end, you kept his secret. The little room became a linen closet once more, and you tucked lavender sachets between the clean white sheets.


	5. The Five of Swords

Heavy drapes obscured every window. Your fond laugh  
wrapped around me as I rushed to pull them away.  
  
My long black hair, a bond around your wrists: you, captive  
to eyelashes you named thick as juniper brush.  
  
Cream tipped in a steady stream illuminates dark,  
bitter coffee while steam curls around your beard.  
  
Trimming roses was its own small combat and when  
blood was drawn, you kissed it away with smiling eyes.  
  
Your hands, rough and cracked, your nails kept so neatly trimmed  
were still enough to hurt my soft and pliant flesh.  
  
And then you were gone, my bed left empty. So strange  
to be without you in this house that was not mine.  
  
I took the key off of the ring - tucked it in my drawer  
to muffle temptation with cobalt silk and lace.  
  
Still I could hear it calling with your rumbling tone,  
pleading with me to return it to its lost home.  
  
I could have wept to see them – my four lost sisters –   
and yet my eyes were dry. Until I saw the red.  
  
There was so little time to fret, to scrub with sand,  
to plot to fly, to fight, to fall, or to misplace.  
  
It was such a small thing, dwarfed by your massive palm,  
and your fingers closed around it, knuckles so white.  
  
My voice, a stranger to me after solitude,   
caressed your cheek with melodies my mother sung.  
  
Your eyes: like wells, like caverns, like the dark of the  
cloistered, ever-stained room at the end of the hall.  
  
Those same fingers that left marks of welcomed passion   
upon my thighs now closed around my throat. Silence.  
  
It never was my story, for the key came first  
and I, in death, am a bit player in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This poetic form is called a ghazal. To quote the Academy of American Poets website: "Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani musicians. The form has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumi and Hafiz."


	6. The Eight of Swords

It should have made your hands shake, what you saw. It should have made you nauseous. But it didn’t.

The little door once more shut and locked, you return to the room you shared with him, climbing into the enormous bed. It had always dwarfed you: a massive piece of furniture, carved from oak and stained to a near-black. Heavy drapes hung around it in brocade the color of storm clouds.

Now you crawl into the exact center, the last survivor of a shipwreck huddling on a raft. Around you, the room you’ve only recently begun to consider your own. On your nightstand is a framed portrait of your sister from when she was young.

If only you could see her again.

Carefully, you slip the key off of its long cord and tip it from side to side, studying it in the light. It had been perfectly translucent, like clear, still water. Now it’s red. You pull your ring off to compare stone to key. You had thought the stone was ruby, but now you’re not so sure.

The thought makes your spine crawl.

Have you been wearing them? Was their lifeblood wrapped around your finger, anchoring you to him? Your own blood feels thicker, slower, more sluggish in your veins.

Your fingers twitch on the stem of the key and you itch to snap it, but the attempt would be pointless. The tide is rising and there is no higher ground.

You rest your forehead on your knees and you can just see the headboard, memories striking you hard in the gut. His large, calloused hand pinning down your wrists, the other hand trailing sparks down your bared skin. He had moved with certainty, knowing you were his entirely. Fingers between your thighs, heat curling hard in the pit of your stomach. And more.

You weren’t a virgin when you married him, God knows, but you’d never been taken like that before. Owned completely by his eyes, his hands, his mouth. The hard, hot length of him thrusting into you, taking you to heights you could never have imagined. Even now, still wracked with the horror of what you found, longing and pleasure pulse through your body at the memory: the groan you pulled from him, fingers digging into the muscle of his shoulders as he spent himself inside you.

But the harder memory to bear is the tender press of his lips in the aftermath and the way he clung to you like a drowning man after waking from one of countless nightmares. Tears sting your eyes.

How much had been a lie? You dash away the tears, the proof that you love this monster in spite of everything your mind is screaming at you. Above the bed is his coat of arms: the spread of blades on a quartered field of grey and blue.

The goosedown of the comforter sighs softly as you lie back, the damning key pressed to your breast.

Others might have run.

You don’t.

In time, you fall asleep and dream of dancing, and of a monstrous beast who tears at your flesh, but only tells you the truth. Its love is no lie. Somehow that makes the pain of its claws easier to bear.

Just before dawn, you rise and bathe. You stand, water sliding in rivulets down your skin, and in the mirror the key gleams crimson against your pallor.

Your favorite gown is dark green and in it you look unreal: your skin too pale, your hair too black, too glossy to be human. With the red of the key held to your cheek, you seem to have stepped from a different story. One where death is not death, and a kiss awakens.

But that was never where your story was to end. All roads lead to a small, dark room.

You hear horses in the quiet dawn. Your footsteps are almost silent as you descend the stairs to wait.


	7. The Queen of Swords: The Very First

Did he beat you in a fit of rage?  
Did you hang yourself, slit your wrists, knowing what a monster he was?  
Did you die in childbirth or go through his desk drawers, a different type of betrayal?  
Or were you ill, did you waste away and fade –  
these other women, are they your ghost  
as he sought you out, time and again?  
  
He has a housekeeper of many, many years.  
Surely she has keys to all the rooms, but no one pays her any mind  
and no one ever questions.  
She’s sweet and quiet, with lines around her eyes and mouth,  
silver in her long, bound hair.  
Her hands are calloused from the work;  
she does not sleep with the other servants.


	8. A Wedding Toast

I want to write you something beautiful

as if there was a single word inside of me  
that could capture the edges of those steel-wool clouds cutting   
against the eye as the sun vanishes behind the tawny hills  
or the whorled landscape of your fingertips.  
  
And I want to write you something terrible  
terrifying and troubling and lasting,  
something to mimic the wild fluttering of your pulse  
as my fingers wrap around your wrist in desperation,  
begging you to stay stay stay.   
  
There is gold   
and there is gold and there is gold.  
There is a delicate chain, links half-crushed  
and sinking into the mud.  
The crest of the rising light stealing mysteries away  
and spreading new ones of its own.  
You are out of reach and yet and yet  
I will feel the asphalt beneath my heels  
as I run for you and one day, perhaps,   
I’ll see you crowned with brushfire.


End file.
